I'd been a model for a long time now. Just now, I was on a shoot with the famous photographer, Jeremy MacFarlane. Well, I say famous, but he was only famous in that little world of fashion photography and showed in Paris and London at big fashion shows. That was a universe away from where I normally lived and worked, but he'd discovered me and made my life interesting, with all expenses paid work and trips to Paris and New York, and clothes, tips, presents, always cash.
The other models I normally worked with wouldn't have said he was famous, but they would have been impressed enough by the presents and the cash.
Our business relationship was weird. I was one of his favourite models, a high-profile one at that, and he handed out enough to get us to where we wanted to be, which was a union. But he was so weird and out of touch with his own generation that he had to go to Europe and pose with other sections of his industry and pretend to be more than they were.
The shoot went like this. We waited for hours and he didn't even show. In fact, there was no phone call, no note. He wasn't even late. No one had seen him in days. I looked at my phone, but as usual, it was switched off.
I was told that a woman he was going out with had married another guy and he didn't want to see me anymore. I put two and two together and knew he was dead. I knew this already, because I'd also been handed the message before. He'd had two girlfriends before me and had eventually moved on to someone else. When I heard it again a few weeks later, I knew it was true.
Two days after I got the last message to say that he was expecting to be alone on his birthday, I told the photographer and crew that I was taking the afternoon off.
I stood aimlessly around the entrance to the building in which we were shooting. I did some shopping in town, nothing really. I looked at the menu and didn't really have any appetite for the food. I sat in a cafe with a cup of coffee and didn't even bother reading the newspaper. I was a kind of zombie, like someone who'd discovered that a loved one had died. Their body was there on the seat, but their mind was reeling to the point where they were just existing, rather than actually living.
I had reason to be sad. I had a great job and I was the one getting to travel the world, the one getting clothes and presents from agents and clients. I used to be the one getting the attention and the money, but I didn't like it anymore. I'd thought I was the only one who'd noticed, but I knew other people had also seen that Jeremy tap-danced his way around the mini-plaza, pretending to be a fashion photographer, when in fact he was nothing more than a hack.
I waited for two or three hours for him to show up. I texted him and I called him, but I also knew he was dead, and that I'd never see him again.
The next day I reported him missing to the police and told them that he didn't come to dinner with me, as he'd promised, and that he hadn't answered any of my texts and phone calls.
They asked me how they were going to find him, and I said I wasn't worried about that. They asked me if I was sure, and I said I was, because he was dead.
After a while, the police asked me to go home.